Pope Benedict XVI, who announced Monday his intentions to resign, leads the Ash Wednesday service at St. Peter's Basilica. / FRANCO ORIGLIA/GETTY IMAGES

By Harry T. Cook

Detroit Free Press Guest Writer

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So startling and unexpected was the result of the papal succession in 1958 -- Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII) to Àngelo Roncalli (John XXIII) -- that it is possible to imagine such a transition occurring again as Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) lays down the burden and a new Bishop of Rome comes to the throne of the Catholic Church.

Pacelli was not above invoking papal infallibility and counted as one of his landmark accomplishments the establishment of a feast day commemorating the assumption into heaven of the Virgin Mary -- just what he must have thought the world needed in November 1950 as the Cold War got colder and the Korean war hotter.

Pacelli's papacy had held the Roman Church in bondage to the Tridentine formulae of the Counter-Reformation, and, as became evident in the years to come, a new generation of bishops and church scholars was yearning for what Roncalli early on in his time as pope called aggiornamento -- a bringing up to date.

Roncalli was elected, as the story goes, to be a transitional pope. Few at the time could have imagined how far-reaching a transition would materialize by the time Roncalli's Second Vatican Council was finished. It may be that even he did not know fully what significant changes the council would propose. He only saw the beginnings of it due to his untimely death in June 1963 -- fully 2 1/2 years before the council's adjournment.

While Roncalli's successor, Giovanni Montini (Paul VI), had the option of abandoning the council, he insisted that it be continued. Yet, a rather Hamlet-like man, Montini was sometimes hesitant in instituting reforms. Withal, the vernacular mass of Vatican II would look a bit more like the communal meal of the early church than did its Latin predecessor. Bishops were encouraged to meet collegially in their own nations to determine local policy. The lay order was to share power with the clergy.

Catholic reactionaries were immediately hostile to many of the reforms and eventually found in Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) and his successor, Ratzinger, allies in blocking their full implementation, and in some case reversing them.

A harbinger of the Wojtyla era appeared shortly after the close of Vatican II, when American bishops, including John Dearden of Detroit and Karl Meyer of Chicago, encouraged Montini to acknowledge the widespread, here-to-stay use of the contraceptive popularly known as "The Pill" and to refine the church's stern prohibition of birth control to meet its people where they were, rather than where dated tradition wanted them.

Alas, Montini was relentlessly lobbied by the Curia (the Catholic Church's central governing body) to reassert the status quo. The encyclical Humanae Vitae was the result, with its reaffirmation that birth control -- other than the rhythm method -- remained a no-no. That contributed to a diminishment of what once had been an almost unquestioned fealty of the lay order to church tradition.

Coupled with the liberty appropriated by women religious and a flood of priests leaving their rectories to be married, the church's grip on American and European cultures was weakened. Roncalli's aggiornamento was accomplished by the people themselves, leaving a recalcitrant church behind.

The cardinal electors will soon have before them the opportunity to find another Roncalli to steer the ship into a fresh wind -- back toward the course set more than 50 years ago when bringing the church into the 20th Century seemed possible. The 21st Century is now in its second decade.

Harry T. Cook reported religion for the Free Press from 1979 to 1983. He covered John Paul II's historic visit to the U.S. in October 1979.